Digital Publishing Company

Active Magazine utilises Flash technology. This is what creates the impression of a magazine together with shadowing and the page-turning effect.

The flash viewer is ideal for delivering high-quality images and double page spreads. It also allows for rich media to be embedded in the pages, so a visually stunning magazine can also have movement and interactivity creating a full multi-media experience.

Adobe’s Flash player is installed as standard on most PCs and Macs—penetration is estimated at 96%—so readers will not have to download special software to view the magazine. You can always include a link to the optional download of Flash from Adobe.

The Flash files which create the impression of a page can themselves contain Flash files (.swf) which have within them moving images. This allows for huge creativity within the digital magazines as pictures and adverts can be dramatically brought to life by interactive, moving images. See some examples.

We offer two services: the embedding of rich media and the creation of rich media. We charge by the hour to design and create rich media and a fixed cost equal to one hours‘ labour to embed each .swf file.

Video files are embedded with or without a player. We would like .flv (Flash video) files. We use Flash media encoder to create the .flv files. It comes standard with Macromedia Flash 8.0 and above. We use the default flash-encoding profiles: Flash 8.0 (low, medium or high).

Depending on the source video you have to decide which profile to use. The higher the video quality the bigger the file size and the more bandwidth usage and load time required. Smaller is better as long as the quality satisfies the customer.

For sound we prefer mp3 files. Bit rate varies depending on the encoder quality but, in general, 96 kbps (kilobits per second) is good enough for us to work with. Higher bit-rates create bigger file sizes and slows the loading time down.